Rated G, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with Audrey Tautou (Amelie Poulain), Mathieu Kassovitz (Nino Quincammpoix), Rufus (Amelie's father), Yolande Moreau (Madeleine Wallace), running time: 122 minutes. In French, with Chinese subtitles.
Amelie Poulain is a waitress in a Montmarte cafe who lives a quiet life in a building occupied by some unusual characters; a weepy conciege, a painter with fragile bones who each year repaints a celebrated Renoir, and a dyspeptic grocer. When one day she finds a box of childhood memories stashed in her apartment decades earlier, she vows to return the contents to its estranged owner. This simple act of kindness alters the course of her life as she dedicates herself to becoming a doer of increasingly complex good deeds for the woebegone -- along the way, of course, discovering love. Jeunet, who's never made an upbeat film in his life, set out to do just that here. Given the film's popularity in France, he seems to have been successful. Fifty million French people can't be wrong. Or so the saying goes.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
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